Consumer healthcare apps linked to smartphones or wearable devices are growing in popularity, and forthcoming offerings from Apple and Google are likely to draw more attention to the field. These systems allow users to monitor a range of information—heart rate, calories burned, distance walked—but they don’t guarantee a change in behavior, much less an improvement in health.

Digital future Laboratory Talk After biomedical scientists scan the slides, which hold prepared biopsied tissues some 5 microns thick, the samples do not travel to the scientist's desk as they once did, but instead go straight back to storage.

US researchers have built a wirelessly powered pacemaker the size of a grain of rice and implanted it in a rabbit. They were able to hold a metal plate a few centimetres above the rabbit's chest and use it to regulate the animal's heartbeat. If such medical implants could be made to work in humans, it could lead to smaller devices that are safer to fit. The findings are published in the journal PNAS.

The researchers from Stanford University hope their development could also eventually dispense with the bulky batteries and clumsy recharging systems that are currently a feature of such devices.

The central discovery was a new type of wireless power transfer that could safely penetrate deep inside the body, using roughly the same power as a cell phone.

"We need to make these devices as small as possible to more easily implant them deep in the body," said co-author Dr Ada Poon, from Stanford's department of electrical engineering. Near-field waves can be safely used, but they can only transfer power over short distances.

The researchers were able to design a device that blends the safety of near-field waves with the reach of far-field waves. "With this method, we can safely transmit power to tiny implants in organs like the heart or brain, well beyond the range of current near-field systems," said John Ho, a graduate student in Dr Poon's lab.

Researchers and collaborators of the Soh lab at UC Santa Barbara have developed an implantable device to monitor real time concentrations of medications in the blood. The device, called the MEDIC (Microfluid Electrochemical Detector for In Vivo Concentrations), aims to address an increasingly identified problem in medicine – that people metabolize and respond to the same medication at the same dose in very different ways.

A great deal of focus has been on identifying genetic polymorphisms and other markers that can be used to identify patients who are either resistant to certain medications or at risk for adverse effects – think HLA typing prior to initiating Tegretol therapy.

The device itself consists of a chamber through which a constant stream of the patient’s blood runs. At the base of the chamber, small sensing molecules called aptamers bind the drug molecules. Once the drug molecule is bound to the aptamer, a tiny jolt of current is sent to an external device so the drug concentration can be calculated.

The researchers have overcome the problem of particles in natural blood sticking to and coating the sensor by adding a buffer layer to the chamber.

This device aims to open new opportunities into the personalization of medicine.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University in St. Louis have developed a new device that may one day help prevent heart attacks.

Unlike existing pacemakers and implantable defibrillators that are one-size-fits-all, the new device is a thin, elastic membrane designed to stretch over the heart like a custom-made glove.

The new cardiac device -- a thin, stretchable membrane imprinted with a spider-web-like network of sensors and electrodes -- is custom-designed to fit over the heart and contract and expand with it as it beats.

University of Illinois materials scientist John Rogers co-led the team that invented the new device. He says they used high-resolution imaging, computer modeling, and a 3-D printer to create a plastic model of a heart. Then, they used that as a mold to make a thin, elastic membrane designed to fit snugly over the real heart’s surface.

Rogers compares the silicon version to the heart’s natural membrane, the pericardium. “But this artificial pericardium is instrumented with high quality, man-made devices that can sense and interact with the heart in different ways that are relevant to clinical cardiology,” Rogers said.

Washington University biomedical engineer Igor Efimov helped design and test the new device. He says the membrane’s spider-web-like network of specialized electrodes can continuously monitor the heart’s electrical activity and keep it beating at a healthy rate.

“When it senses such a catastrophic event as a heart attack or arrhythmia, it can also apply a high definition therapy,” Efimov said.

“So it can apply stimuli, electrical stimuli, from different locations on the device in an optimal fashion to stop this arrhythmia and prevent sudden cardiac death.”

Efimov calls the new device a huge advance and hopes it will be approved for use in patients in 10 to 15 years.

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In today’s doctor’s office, when a physician diagnoses a patient, a number of tests are consulted and the best possible course of treatment is prescribed. Unfortunately there is often limited data that allows the doctor to tailor and customize treatment specifically to a patient's biology and lifestyle. But there are five ways technology will change that over the next decade, bringing personalized medicine to fruition. 1) Correlations and Data Science. As consumers we first realized the power of correlation with e-commerce. Amazon's "people like you also bought" feature introduced algorithms to look at our online buying profile and match us to others so we could easily find new products we might enjoy. These commerce algorithms are in fact the foundational technology for creating medical algorithms to segment populations for clinical trials. Ultimately, physicians will use biomarkers and genetics to correlate a patient to a population "like him" and thus match him to the most efficacious treatment. At the current moment, a handful of diseases with simple and direct markers have been found, but the power of correlation will truly come to fruition in approaches like those used by researchers Nigam Shaw and Russ Altman, who have been able to use data mining to identify potential rare side effects and segment the population into those at risk of experiencing those side effects. By understanding a person’s biology and how he will react to a particular therapy, researchers will be able to develop more targeted and effective treatment options and physicians will more accurately prescribe those treatments. 2) Advancing Clinical Utility of Genomics. Obtaining sequencing data has gotten faster and less expensive, but bottlenecks exist not just in regulatory process but also in correlating DNA sequence with clinical outcomes. Great examples of sequences with clinical utility exist, such as BRCA1, BRCA2 in breast cancer or the CFTR gene for cystic fibrosis. A key driver for the future is advancement of clinical utility for other genes with advances in the bioinformatics pipelines and data management. Major players in sequencing technologies are already offering data analysis and data storage cloud services in addition to just the instrumentation. New technologies that break the bottleneck in analysis and drive clinical utility of additional genes will be crucial to advancing the translation of sequencing to the clinic. 3) "Datafication" of Tissue. To date, much of the buzz in personalized medicine has been focused on the increasing possibility to easily extract data from DNA. The reality is that diagnoses today and in the future will be made of multiple types of diagnostic data. It will be essential for scientists and clinicians to be able to mine not just DNA, but also extract quantifiable data from images. At Definiens, we've termed the datafication of tissue images and its correlation with clinical outcomes “phenomics”. Although genomic data can give clues to the ideal therapy, tissue images typically are more highly correlated to stage and presentation of disease, making the correlation of both types of data essential to the future of personalized medicine. 4) Telemedicine and Biosensors. At September's TedMed, Eric Topol dazzled audiences by using a cell phone to remotely monitor vital signs. While the term personalized medicine originally applied to tailored therapies, many like Topol believe that personalized medicine will also entail the use of devices and sensors for physicians to continuously monitor their patients remotely and tailor treatments on the go. Today's sensors are as small as a dime, but advances in nanotechnology could shrink sensors to allow for implantation in the body. With this miniaturization, you can imagine a day in which not only could glucose levels be monitored effortlessly in diabetics, but biomarkers of response to prescribed treatments could be continuously monitored via small sensors to alert physicians if threshold levels were reached. 5) Engineering Cells and Printing Organs. Within the next few decades, 3D printing will come to medicine. With over ninety thousand Americans awaiting organs, nothing will become more personal than the ability to "print" an organ from your own cells. Regenerative medicine pioneer Tony Atala has already printed the first 3-D kidneys and San Diego-based start-up Organovo is working on the 3-D printing of a liver. Initially 3-D tissue prints will be used as models for drug action and safety, but many believe that in 10-15 years 3D printing will enable tissue and organ construction from cells harvested from the patient, providing the ability to produce custom and personalized organs on demand. Scooped From: http://www.bio-itworld.com/2013/10/18/5-ways-technology-is-changing-personalized-medicine.html
Via nrip

Interesting article about how technology is changing medicine. After reading this article research one of the technologies that was mentioned in the article in more depth. How is the technology you researched changing the health care field and the experience of the patient? Discuss.

Activities that involve gathering vast quantities of data are often portrayed in a negative light, but Sophie Curtis reveals how 'big data' is also being used to identify the links between genetics and diseases.

Why Public Disclosure of Anatomic Pathology Errors in Canada, But No Similar ... DARKDaily.com - Laboratory News On October 1-2, 2013, the seventh annual Lab Quality Confab in New Orleans, Louisiana, will tackle these subjects.

A Multi-Cancer Diagnostic? Scientist (blog) “The idea is elegant, but there are clearly things missing,” said Antonia Vlahou, a clinical proteomics researcher at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens in Greece who was not...

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes – each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair – is an odd experience. It is so dark that the human eye cannot understand what it is seeing. Shapes and contours are lost, leaving nothing but an apparent abyss.

If it was used to make one of Chanel's little black dresses, the wearer's head and limbs might appear to float incorporeally around a dress-shaped hole.

Actual applications are more serious, enabling astronomical cameras, telescopes and infrared scanning systems to function more effectively. Then there are the military uses that the material's maker, Surrey NanoSystems, is not allowed to discuss.

The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by the Newhaven-based company. While the sheets may be crumpled into miniature hills and valleys, this landscape disappears on areas covered by it.

"You expect to see the hills and all you can see … it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. It just looks so strange," said Ben Jensen, the firm's chief technical officer. Asked about the prospect of a little black dress, he said it would be "very expensive" – the cost of the material is one of the things he was unable to reveal. "You would lose all features of the dress. It would just be something black passing through," he said.

Vantablack, which was described in the journal Optics Express and will be launched at the Farnborough International Airshow this week, works by packing together a field of nanotubes, like incredibly thin drinking straws. These are so tiny that light particles cannot get into them, although they can pass into the gaps between. Once there, however, all but a tiny remnant of the light bounces around until it is absorbed.

Vantablack's practical uses include calibrating cameras used to take photographs of the oldest objects in the universe. This has to be done by pointing the camera at something as black as possible.

Online quizzes that predict when you’re going to die were popular for a while, but now there is an actual test that could uncover your expiration date. 17,000 samples of blood from Finland and Estonia were tested to uncover which of 100 biomarkers were present in people that died within five years. Researchers turned up four specific biomarkers linked to a higher risk of dying from heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses.

The four culprits responsible for early death include albumin, alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, citrate, and the size of low-density lipoprotein particles. Albumin has already been linked to early death in the past, but the other three have been under the radar until now. Scientists made sure there there were no other contributing factors either, such as old age, obesity, cholesterol levels, or alcohol use, amongst others.

LAPTOP-HF is designed to investigate a new way to help treat heart failure. Since many heart failure patients are frequently hospitalized and often feel poorly, the hope is that this system may help your doctor adjust your medications before you develop symptoms or require hospitalization.

This is accomplished by measuring pressure in the heart and then each day providing you with your physician’s updated recommended medications and dosages. These may change daily depending on your condition. This is very similar to how diabetics manage their glucose levels. -

A team of researchers from Stanford say they've created a system to "eavesdrop" on the brain, allowing them to monitor a person's brain activity while that person moves around (and thinks) in a normal environment, instead of, say, an MRI chamber. Scary! Mind-reading! Inception! BWAMMM.

No, not really: it would be tough to pull the researchers' trick off in cognito. To make it happen, the team removed parts of skull from three patients experiencing frequent, drug-resistant epileptic seizures, then attached a packet of electrodes to their exposed brains. After that, the researchers let the patients experience their stay in the hosptial as they normally would, using the electrodes to record data on the seizures, as well as everything else they did during the hospital stay, like eating or speaking.

Cameras monitored the patients from their rooms, allowing the researchers to determine how the data they got from the electrodes matched up with what the patient was doing at a given time. (Something like: At 3:31 p.m. the patient was eating, according to the video; this is what was happening in their brain at that time.) As part of the study, the researchers also had the three patients go through an experiment: true or false questions flashed by on a computer screen, and the patients answered them. When the questions dealt with math (Does 2 plus 4 make 5?), a region of the brain known to light up when people are calculating, called the intraparietal sulcus, was sparked. That wasn't so surprising.

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